The Medici Conspiracy (54 page)

Robin Symes left the medical wing of Pentonville Prison, North London, after securing time off for good behavior, in September 2005. The civil action with the Papadimitriou family is still not resolved. He still has a one-year suspended sentence hanging over him. That's in Britain. In Italy, Ferri is still reviewing future cases and the fall of Robin Symes may not yet be complete.

W
HEN OPERATION GERYON BEGAN, when Pasquale Camera's organigram was discovered, there were
some
new names in the frame, but not many. The organigram confirmed the general picture, so far as Conforti and his men understood it, but it primarily resulted in their focusing on the Italians who were masterminding the export of illicit material out of Italy—Medici, Becchina, and Savoca. The Melfi theft had led them to Savoca; then Hodges's documents leaked to us confirmed the importance of Medici; and the more Conforti and Ferri looked at Medici, the more they heard about Becchina. No one had hitherto grasped Medici's great importance, or his intimate links with Sotheby's, or the very
organized
nature of the trade and the way it was designed to protect the world's rogue museums. These were the main things to come out of the investigation.

In a sense, the organigram was a symbol of the whole exercise. As Conforti had noted, criminals invariably write things down. The same was true in the antiquities underworld. Camera had left his diagram to be found and, in Munich, Savoca's meticulous record keeping had led the Carabinieri farther forward. Medici's own records were copious, and Hecht's memoir likewise had proved to be gold dust. Thanks to Conforti's idea for a pool of magistrates, thanks to some excellent and diligent detective work among the Polaroids, thanks to Ferri's ability to use the information from Geneva to persuade other members of the cordata to cooperate, Medici's trial was at long last about to begin.

But then, one morning just before Christmas in December 2003, days after the trial had opened, the phone taps suddenly turned up trumps—and yet another archive fell into Ferri's lap. Listening in on a conversation
involving one of the more familiar names, the eavesdroppers suddenly encountered someone who was entirely new, a man who was to be a revelation. They heard him talking on the phone taps, they learned that his name was Giuseppe Evangelisti, and they found that he had a nickname,
“Peppino il taglialegna”
—Peppino the woodcutter. They subsequently discovered that the nickname derived from what we might call Evangelisti's “day job”: He provided wood to two whole villages. But that was not his only activity, not at all. There was also his “night job.”

The phone tap had taken place just before lunchtime. That afternoon, having located Evangelisti's address from the phone number at Capo di Monte, near Lake Bolsena, north of Rome, they paid him a visit. They found him to be a tall, robust, and muscular individual in his late fifties. He was a gentle man, with receding hair and tanned skin; he looked every inch a woodcutter. He was—not unnaturally—surprised to see them, but he didn't appear nervous. On the other hand, according to one of the investigators who took part in the raid, the woodcutter's wife certainly was. The investigators told the couple they had heard Evangelisti's conversation on the telephone that day, so they knew he had looted objects and they weren't leaving until he took them to where the antiquities were located. The Carabinieri had expected to be taken to some lockup a distance away, but in fact he took them to his garage, which was under the house. And there four surprises greeted them.

In his garage they located hundreds of looted antiquities—still broken, still dirty with soil, all local, fragments in sacks and fruit boxes,
all classified by type
: Attic, Buccheri, ceramics, bronzes. In addition, they found a veritable library of archaeological books, all scientific. “This man wanted to understand the
value
of objects abroad—what foreign museums and collections were made up of,” said one Carabinieri.

So far the find had been interesting but not especially sensational, the biggest surprise being that his name was new to them. That was about to change.

In the garage there was a table for restoring, with a palette, brushes, and other technical equipment. Above the table, however, was a shelf on which were a number of other books. When the Carabinieri examined these books, they got the surprise of their lives, for these books contained two precious records. In the first place, the woodcutter was a photography
buff and had photographed
every
object he had ever looted—hundreds and hundreds of vases, statues, stone columns, and terra-cotta tiles. Here, in other words, was a visual record to put alongside Medici's, a visual record of what had been dug up and smuggled abroad. This record was obviously important in itself, because it means that those who traffic in illicit antiquities can no longer be sure that there is no photographic record of what they deal in, which proves that “their” objects come from Italy.

The other batch of books on the shelf in Evangelisti's garage included agendas and diaries for the years 1997 to 2002. (There were nine books of agendas in total, and seven albums of photographs.) Most exciting of all, it transpired that the woodcutter was obsessive and the agendas supplemented the photographs:
He had recorded what he had found, when, and where
. He had noted the locations he had dug at, the kind of tomb he had uncovered, even at what depth objects had been uncovered. In Daniela Rizzo's twenty-six years experience, she told us, the woodcutter was the only person—apart from Medici—to record such specific information. This was a breakthrough, not on the size of Medici's perhaps (or Symes's), but it was of the first importance all the same. Not only did Evangelisti give dates and places, but he also drew little maps of where the tombs were in which fields, with drawings showing how many paces they were from this or that tree. His descriptions of the objects were also far more scientific than other tombaroli. For example, he would write “Amphoretta with three big birds and heads of horses.” It was enough for Daniela Rizzo to recognize the piece as an important Etruscan ceramic figure. “This man has a collection of figures, of Etruscan objects that the Villa Giulia dreams about—we don't have such a thing.”

The woodcutter's archive named the owners of the land he dug on. The owners played an important part, because he made it clear, as Casasanta had, that the owners were paid for letting people dig on their land, and took a share of anything that was found. Occasionally, Evangelisti's agenda even gave the percentage that the owners had received. The notations for each tomb included the fate of the pieces he found and the prices they fetched. Then, even more amazingly, at the end of the year he balanced the books. Here for instance, is the woodcutter's record for:

The year 2000 was a better year—sixty-eight tombs excavated, 737 pieces found, sold for 164 million lire ($135,000). In all, Pellegrini calculated that over the four years for which the records were most complete, Evangelisti had excavated 204 tombs, discovered 1,764 objects, and earned 185,000 euros ($154,000). Evangelisti himself estimated that a third of his income went in expenses so that his net gain over these four years was 130,000 euros ($108,000), or 32,500 euros per year ($27,000). This amounts to a tomb a week, each tomb yielding an average of roughly nine objects. These figures also show that, again on average, Evangelisti sold his antiquities for 105 euros (approximately $88). This compares with the average price of antiquities at auction, which is 1,000 euros (roughly $830) and the average price of Robin Symes's 17,000 antiquities (£3,750/$5,000).

Finally, Evangelisti recorded who, and on what dates, he had sold what to: Names included Medici, Cilli (whom he regarded as a “factotum” of Medici), the Aboutaams, who, he said, came to see him at home, and a prominent gallery in London's Mayfair district.

The Evangelisti discovery was almost scientific in its specificity. It removed any lingering doubt about the scale of the looting, its importance, or the role of the familiar litany of names involved.

T
HE PALACE OF JUSTICE in the
quartiere
Clodio of Rome is by no means a beautiful building. On the contrary, it is made of gray concrete, a brutal modernist monstrosity of six stories, disfigured by rain and as dreary inside as out. It resembles nothing so much as a beached, out-of-commission aircraft carrier left to molder in dry dock. Piazzale Clodio is a large, long square of bus terminals, plane trees, and gas stations. Off it, governing the approaches to the courts, is a small, nondescript dead end with a bank, a motorcycle repair shop, and a sad café, where attorneys, police, and defendants grab a last cigarette and cappuccino before submitting themselves to a security check. This is not the Eternal City at her best.

The trial of Giacomo Medici began on December 4, 2003. Medici is of course one of the most famous names in all Italy, if not the world. Historians judge that the Florentine Medicis—“the godfathers of the Renaissance,” to quote one recent study—included no fewer than fifty-four individuals worth writing about. Besides Lorenzo the Magnificent and Cosimo, there were Garcia, Gian Gastone, Giancarlo, seven Giovannis, two Giulianos, a Giulio, and a Guccio. But there has never been, until now, a Giacomo Medici. There is no danger that anyone can confuse the godfather of the Freeport with any other Medici.

The trial opened eight long years after the first arrests, since the discovery of Pasquale Camera's organigram, since the first raids in Geneva and the sealing of Corridor 17 with wax, since the first revelations about Medici's dealings at Sotheby's. During that time, Sotheby's had stopped selling antiquities in London (though sales at Bonhams had mushroomed) and had closed three departments; Felicity Nicholson had retired, and its chairman, A. Alfred Taubman, had been sent to jail for a year and a day
in the United States for his part in a price-fixing scandal, when Sotheby's and Christie's had conspired to charge customers the same (increased) commission. Symes had suffered his own misfortunes, as had several others who had been Medici's collaborators.

The trafficking in illicit antiquities still went on, however, despite all these events and setbacks for the traffickers. Though he must have known that he would be followed, at least from time to time, Medici had still continued to meet tombaroli. Paolo Ferri himself bumped into Medici in Geneva on one of his visits there. Robert Hecht, on his visits to Rome, was also followed and he, too, met with fellow traffickers in looted objects.

And so, for Ferri, for Conforti (even though he had retired by then), for Rizzo, Pellegrini, and the more senior officers in the Carabinieri Art Squad, the trial could not start quickly enough. They had a mountain of evidence—and nothing in the interrogations and raids had contradicted the picture they had built up via the documentation. On the contrary, it had added to and deepened their understanding of the way the traffic works, and its far-reaching extent. So far as they were concerned, this case was triply important because Medici was by far the biggest trafficker they had ever proceeded against, because they had more documentary and other evidence against him than they had ever had against anyone else, and because his links to the international trading circuit were more established, more sophisticated—and better documented—than ever before with anyone else.